Education

The building empties twice: at four in the afternoon, and for ten weeks in June.

Preschools, K-12 buildings, private schools and college campuses — nightly cleaning that works around practices, rehearsals and evening lettings, and the summer program where the floors come back.

What it is

A school is two cleaning contracts wearing one uniform. From August to May it is a high-traffic building full of people, cleaned every night around a schedule that is never the published one — the game that ran long, the concert, the parent evening, the practice that has the gym until nine. From June to August it is an empty building and a deadline, where the floors get stripped and refinished, the carpets come back, and everything that cannot be done with children in it gets done.

The nightly half is mostly about restrooms, floors and touch points, in that order. Restrooms are what a parent notices and what a superintendent hears about. Corridor and cafeteria floors are what the building looks like. Touch points — door handles, rails, desks, shared keyboards, water-fountain buttons — are what actually moves illness through a school, and they are the thing most contracts under-specify.

The summer half is a project with a hard date. School floors are the largest single piece of it: stripping the old finish out of corridors and cafeterias and laying new coats down takes crews, machines and an empty building, and it has to be finished before staff come back, not before students do. That work is scheduled in writing in the spring, because a crew that turns up in July to find the building being re-roofed has lost the summer.

And schools have a rule nobody has to explain twice: the adults in the building get checked. Everyone who works in a school for us is our employee, background-checked, badged and trained — never a subcontractor whose vetting we cannot see.

What we clean

Classrooms and corridors, nightly

Desks and tables wiped; touch points disinfected — door handles, switches, rails, shared devices
Trash and recycling out; liners replaced
Floors swept and damp-mopped, or vacuumed where carpeted; corridors done after the last activity, not before
Entry glass and interior glass at hand height — which in an elementary building means child height too
Boards, sills, vents and ledges dusted on a rotation rather than never

Restrooms and locker rooms

Fixtures cleaned and disinfected; partitions, dispensers and mirrors wiped
Floors machine-scrubbed or wet-mopped to the corners — where a restroom smell actually lives
Paper, soap and liners restocked, with empties reported the same night
Drains flushed on a schedule where floor-drain traps dry out over a break
Locker rooms and shower areas cleaned and disinfected to their own frequency

Gyms, cafeterias and common space

Cafeteria tables, benches and serving-line fronts cleaned after each service
Cafeteria and commons floors done after the last event of the day
Gym floors dust-mopped nightly and machine-cleaned to the manufacturer's method — a wood sport floor is not scrubbed like tile and the wrong product voids its finish
Bleachers, mats and equipment areas cleaned to an agreed frequency
Entrances and vestibules kept on top of in winter, when salt and grit do more floor damage than a year of traffic

The summer program

Corridor, cafeteria and classroom hard floors stripped and refinished, scheduled in writing in the spring
Carpet deep cleaned in classrooms, libraries and offices
Interior and exterior window cleaning while the building is empty
Power washing of entries, walkways, dumpster areas and playground hard surfaces
High dusting, vents, light diffusers and anything else that needs a ladder and no children

How service works here

Held back for review: this part of Build4 named a customer or a person, or carried a figure, so it was held back. It is listed in the doorway ledger.

Getting started

Walkthrough, ideally with the activity calendar in hand. We want to see the building at the time it is actually cleaned.
Written scope and a separate summer plan. Two documents because they are two jobs, priced separately so you can take one without the other.
Crew assigned, checked and trained on the building before a first shift, with a trained backup.
Ongoing. Supervisor inspections on a schedule, a named account manager, and a walk before the year starts and after the summer work finishes.